42 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
sprinting through it,” Lahey said. “What
you really want to do is to go there with
someone who can tell you what you’re
looking at.” The next day, Vescovo told
Lahey that he could take Jamieson to
the bottom of the trench. “I don’t want
to go to the deepest point, because that’s
boring,” Jamieson said. “Let’s go some-
where really cool.”
Four and a half miles below the ship,
the Australia tectonic plate was being
slowly and violently subsumed by the
Eurasia plate. Bongiovanni had noticed
a staircase feature coming out of a fault
line, the result of pressure and breakage
on a geological scale. It extended more
than eight hundred feet up, beyond ver-
tical, with an overhang—an outrageously
difficult dive. Lahey would have to back
up as they ascended, with no clear view
of what was above the sub.
The hatch started leaking during the
descent, but Lahey told Jamieson to ig-
nore it—it would seal with pressure. It
kept dripping for more than ninety min-
utes, and stopped only at fifteen thou-
sand feet. “I fucking told you it would
seal,” Lahey said.
The Limiting Factor arrived at the
bottom just after noon. Lahey approached
the fault-line wall, and headed toward
some bulging black masses. From a dis-
tance, they looked to Jamieson like vol-
canic rock, but as Lahey drew closer more
colors came into view—brilliant reds, or-
anges, yellows, and blues, cloaked in hadal
darkness. Without the lights of the sub-
marine, the colors may never have been
seen, not even by creatures living among
them. These were bacterial mats, deriv-
ing their energy from chemicals emanat-
ing from the planet’s crust instead of from
sunlight. It was through this process of
chemosynthesis that, billions of years ago,
when the earth was “one giant, fucked-up,
steaming geological mass, being bom-
barded with meteorites,” as Jamieson put
it, the first complex cell crossed some in-
tangible line that separates the non-liv-
ing from the living.
Lahey began climbing the wall—up
on the thrusters, then backward. Jamie-
son discovered a new species of snailfish,
a long, gelatinous creature with soft fins,
by looking through a viewport. The pres-
sure eliminates the possibility of a swim
bladder; the lack of food precludes the
ossification of bones. Some snailfish have
antifreeze proteins, to keep them run-
ning in the cold. “Biology is just smelly
engineering,” Jamieson said. “When you
reverse-engineer a fish from the most
extreme environments, and compare it
to its shallow-water counterparts, you
can see the trade-offs it has made.”
The wall climb took an hour. When
the last lander surfaced, Jamieson de-
tached the camera and found that it had
captured footage of a dumbo octopus at
twenty-three thousand feet—the deep-
est ever recorded, by more than a mile.
The Pressure Drop set off toward the
Pacific Ocean. McCallum lowered the
pirate flag. Seven weeks later, Jamieson
received a letter from the Indonesian
government, saying that his research-per-
mit application had been rejected, “due
to national security consideration.”ADAILYFLIGHTTOTHEMOON
B
uckle sailed to Guam, with diver-
sions for Bongiovanni to map the
Yap and Palau Trenches. Several new
passengers boarded, one of whom was
unlike the rest: he had been where they
were going, six decades before. Hadal
exploration has historically prioritized
superlatives, and an area of the Mariana
Trench, known as the Challenger Deep,
contains the deepest water on earth.
On January 23, 1960, two men climbed
into a large pressure sphere, which was
suspended below a forty-thousand-gal-
lon tank of gasoline, for buoyancy. One
of them was a Swiss hydronaut named
Jacques Piccard, whose father, the hot-
air balloonist Auguste Piccard, had de-
signed it. The other was Don Walsh, a
young lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, which
had bought the vehicle, known as a bathy-
scaphe, and modified it to attempt a dive
in the Challenger Deep.
The bathyscaphe was so large that it
had to be towed behind a ship, and its
buoyant gasoline tank was so delicate that
the ship couldn’t travel more than one or
two miles per hour. To find the dive site,
sailors tossed TNT over the side of the
ship, and timed the echo reverberating
up from the bottom of the trench. There
was one viewport, the size of a coin. When
the bathyscaphe hit the bottom, stirring
up sediment, “it was like looking into a
bowl of milk,” Walsh said. A half century
passed before anyone returned.
The bathyscaphe never again dived to
hadal depths. Jacques Piccard died in- Now Don Walsh, who was eighty-
eight, walked up the gangway of the Pres-
sure Drop. It was a short transit to the
Mariana Trench, across warm Pacific wa-
ters, over six-foot swells.
Above the Challenger Deep, Vescovo
pulled on a fire-retardant jumpsuit, and
walked out to the aft deck. A gentle
wind blew in from the east. Walsh shook
Vescovo’s hand. Vescovo climbed into
the Limiting Factor, carrying an ice axe
that he had brought to the summit of
Mt. Everest.
Hatch secured, lift line down, tag lines
released, towline out—pumps on. Ves-
covo wondered, Is the sub able to han-
dle this? He didn’t think it would im-
plode, but would the electronics survive?
The thrusters? The batteries? Besides
Walsh and Piccard, the only other per-
son to go to the bottom of the Chal-
lenger Deep was the filmmaker James
Cameron, in 2012. Multiple systems failed
at the bottom, and his submersible never
dove deep again.
The depth gauge ticked past ten thou-
sand nine hundred metres, thirty-six
thousand feet. After four hours, Vescovo
started dropping variable ballast weights,
to slow his descent. At 12:37 p.m., he
called up to the surface. His message
took seven seconds to reach the Pressure
Drop: “At bottom.”
Outside the viewports, Vescovo saw
amphipods and sea cucumbers. But he
was two miles beyond the limits of fish.
“At a certain point, the conditions are so
intense that evolution runs out of op-
tions—there’s not a lot of wiggle room,”
Jamieson said. “So a lot of the creatures
down there start to look the same.”
Vescovo switched off the lights and
turned off the thrusters. He hovered in
silence, a foot off the sediment bottom,
drifting gently on a current, nearly thirty-
six thousand feet below the surface.
That evening, on the Pressure Drop,
Don Walsh shook his hand again. Ves-
covo noted that, according to the sonar
scan, the submarine data, and the read-
ings from the landers, he had gone deeper
than anyone before. “Yeah, I cried my-
self to sleep last night,” Walsh joked.
T
he Triton team took two mainte-
nance days, to make sure they didn’t
miss anything. But the Limiting Fac-
tor was fine. So Vescovo went down
again to retrieve a rock sample. He found